Sometimes it is forecast to be cloudy, but it looks like it might be worth the risk to bet against the forecast.

You don’t get good pictures if you aren’t setup to take them. The moon in late May was low in the south. It was too low to reach from the observatory, plus the camera in there is too sensitive and won’t run a fast enough exposure to avoid an overexposure. The windbreak on the outside pier was too high to catch the moon that low in the south. Plus the moon was setting as it reached full eclipse, so it was low and getting lower. I set up my 80mm telescope with a mount on a tripod in the driveway where I could see all the way to the horizon.

I have equipment that can be mixed and matched, and that sounds fine if you say it fast. In actuality it takes quite awhile to do a new setup. I put the telescope on a Losmandy plate for the mount. Then I rigged up a temporary holder for a Telrad finder scope on top of the telescope rings. As it got dark, and it gets dark late in late May, I gave the mount a rough polar alignment and leveled it. I had to wait for Polaris to poke through the clouds. Hmmm–clouds. Then I grabbed a Bahtinov mask and found another hole in the clouds to get a quick focus using the camera’s zoom feature (which took me another squinty while). I was going to put the camera on an intervalometer and take automatic photos every five minutes, but the intervalometer battery was dead. So I got out the remote and tested it. Battery also dead. Old stuff, huffed the old guy. I set the shutter on 2 second delay, the white balance on daylight, the aperture in AV mode, plugged in the AC battery power, shut everything off, covered it all in a garbage bag, and headed to bed.

In Utah the eclipse didn’t start its partial phase until 3:45 AM. Full eclipse started at 5:19 AM and lasted a brief eight minutes. After that it would be getting too light to see well. As I went to bed around 11:30 I set the alarm for 4:30. I didn’t know if I was going to be game to get up. It was forecast to be cloudy after all. But if I slept I knew it would be clear.

It was no trouble to wake up. I can never sleep well anyway when I know the alarm is going off early and, as usual, I woke up about a half hour before it went off. I got dressed, grabbed a jacket, put a cap on backward, grabbed strong reading glasses and put the headlamp on its red lamp mode.

When I got out there I could see the moon through clouds. I was cloudy pretty much everywhere, but it might be clearing from the west. Might. You never know. I uncovered everything, got the mount going, found the moon easily in the Telrad and snapped a shot. That is what you see here.

After that it clouded completely. I went in for coffee.

Dang forecast, anyway.